Monday, December 20, 2004

New versions of OpenOffice and AbiWord need testing Good news for open source desktop users. A pre-release test of OpenOffice.org v2.0 is now available for download. Fernando Cassia of The Inquirer posted a quick review today. Good news/bad news: This version includes an Access-like database tool for mortals (good news!), It has the HSQL database engine, which according to Hubert Figuiere is based on a Java runtime, making it non-free software. My question: the OOo install  has always checked for the Java runtime, so what makes this different? Meanwhile, Marc Maurer from the AbiWord project posted this plea for bug-testers. AbiWord’s bugcounts have been rising rapidly over the last few days/weeks. There are currently around 1280 open bugs and 750 fixed bugs that need verification. Since the 2.2.1 release, we have attracted a nice bit of attention, especially from the MacOSX guys, resulting in a nice flow of bugreports. If you were looking for a way to contribute to the AbiWord project, here is a good start: go to our bugzilla, and search for bugs that need confirmation, and see if you can reproduce them. If so, mark the bug as NEW instead of UNCONFIRMED. You can also search for bugs that need verification of truely being fixed. If you can not reproduce the bug anymore using one of the latest AbiWord versions, mark the bug as VERIFIED fixed. Of course you can also examine other bugreports and comment on them with any usefull information you can provide. We could really use your help! If any of y'all have some spare time (which, tragically, I do not), please help these two projects. This is how open-source works--the developers do the work, we users keep giving them more work to do (and occasionally let them know that "this bug really got fixed this time!!") 4:32:47 PM    comment []